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Comment by avgDev | Hacker News Reader

There needs to be a police reform.

Before I became a programmer, I wanted to be a cop, studied criminal justice....as I was going to school I had some cops in class. I befriended many cops and started meeting outside of school with them.

That has resulted in me switching to computer science. I saw cops drinking, telling me to have a drink and not worry....telling me to just call them if I get pulled over. This really didn't sit right with me, and bothers me even today. Then, I heard a story from one cop being out with cop buddies and driving wasted, smashing into car and running away.

I also ran into extremely racist narcs in Chicago. Who would loudly say the N word around African-Americans.

This was like 10+ years ago.

I actually have a cop close to me now, he is a sergeant. He recently told me all his new recruits cannot write, and his job is to rewrite their reports. They have a hard time hiring people now, and this is in one of the most affluent areas in the US.

It seems that younger generation have a very negative view of the police, and rightfully so. There really needs to be an overhaul, however, I really don't know how can you fix something so rotten.

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I think you need to intelligently create and build a parallel institution, with goals, tools, and organization culture better aligned to the needs of building up communities while keeping order in a modern society.

Start with a small scope at the start, fulfilling a small need in a niche part of government. You want to avoid starting a large organization or growing fast, as that would require to lift pieces and personel from existing law enforcement. Then you demonstrate value and a better track record as you build the good-will and cultural cache to slowly expand and push out traditional law enforcement from more and more areas of concern. This should be fairly tractable, as most law enforcement forces these days have a vast array of duties.

You will need a deft political hand to avoid getting on the bad side of existing "law and order" political power centers. You need to present yourself as someone who cares about safety and wants to free up cops to focus on "serious crime". This will help you control the narrative and undermine the eventual "not tough on crime" arguments.

Problem: that's been tried and failed so far. Eg. campus police, security guards, etc.

I think one major problem is that rejects from one domain can transition to another domain without penalties or problems.

Campus police and security guards are just an extension of the state-monopolized violence concept; that isn't what GP was suggesting.

Portland has been having success with Street Response program. 911 dispatches teams of EMTs and mental health specialists to deal with mental health crises.

I have wondered if could have separate organization or non-armed police that deals with administrative issues. Like taking reports or investigating crimes. I think it would be fine doing noise complaints or traffic violations. These are all things that the police have been ignoring recently. I think it would also reduce the problems with having armed police dealing with everything.

As someone living in Portland, I'll add to this that there's a general sense here that Street Response does a great job at handling these issues in a way that's both humane and efficient, while at the same time pretty much the entire city would agree that the police here have been intentionally both slow and unhelpful for years.

I think the biggest takeaway here is that having smaller organizations focused around specific areas, and that have legal intervention power but aren't inherently organized around violence, can help with public issues in statistically significant ways, and do it for cheap. PSR's budget is $12.6 million/year, compared to Portland police getting $249 million in 2023... and yet PSR by itself has reduced police dispatches by 3.2%, reduced fire department dispatches by 3.2%, dramatically cut down on the number of people taken to the hospital as a result of calls, and gets wildly positive reviews from both the general public and the people they respond to, who consider them extremely trustworthy compared to the police.

There are two problems in Portland that could benefit from focused non-police groups. I dont know if city could organize them or if police would allow them.

There has been big jump in murders since pandemic, mostly gang violence. Other cities have had success engaging with gang members and breaking the cycle of violence. Teams with trusted community members and social workers might have some success. Police probably wouldn’t work unlike cities where they are more trusted. Not sure if group should work with police to solve murder or if that hurt their position.

The other place would theft task force, probably inside police but staffed by non-officers. Taking reports would be sufficient but would be better if they could investigate and make cases, No need for armed police except for arrests.

On that second part, I think that Portland, like many other cities, would benefit tremendously if there was a legally empowered but non-police group that existed for after-the-fact fact-finding and record-keeping responses to crimes that have already occurred. Currently if a theft or robbery happens here, the police pretty much don't give a shit and will only even record it if you hassle them at length about it.

Raheem.ai is building the PATCH network as an alternative dispatch system for community crisis responders to show up instead of having to call the police for non-criminal situations. They started with trying to build better complaint systems to support data-driven reform but pivoted toward building an alternative after failing to get buy-in from civic institutions.

I remember reading Luigi Barzini claim that competition between the Carabinieri and Polizia was intended to limit coordinated corruption. In practice the Guardia di Finanza has been especially important in many corruption cases in Italy.

I understood the complaints that a lack of cooperation between law enforcement agencies was instrumental to 9/11, but even at the time putting everything under the Department of Homeland Security sounded like a recipe for a deterioration in attitudes among federal law enforcement agencies, and like it would eventually replicate the problems that come out of police and sheriff unions.

I agree that parallel law enforcement that has a reinforced focus on serving the public, and that has minimal contact with rot-inducing organizations is an excellent idea, and may be the only way to affect change without having to bear the increased incidence of work slowdowns suspected in many cities.

One direction into resolving this, which may seem counter intuitive, is to put more money into police training, and have higher salaries for desired positions.

This in turn (should) attract more people and thus get a better pool to select candidates from.

However the nepotism and in-group mentality does make this difficult to another degree.

Though to play devils advocate, it’s human nature to pull more into an in-group when you feel anyone outside that group is attacking you, and threatening your livelihood for the actions of others.

We should condemn the officers that act wrongly, but calling all of them bastards and such just makes the problem far worse.

Now there’s even greater incentive for police officers to stand with their own, and not call out inappropriate behavior.

Further, now people don’t want to be police officers, making the talent pool very low. And I don’t blame anyone for that. I had a desire to also be an officer at one point, but if I were a kid today, I’d steer clear of it even if I wanted to do more good.

The problem with any solution in US is focus on hyperlocal policing.

US, even if it has private medicine, has tons of regulations around it - like requirement to have regulated medical degree to practice medicine.

For some reason it's impossible to pass law that police needs to have some regulated degree to practice policing.

Police unions are generally the reason it's impossible to pass any sort of reform laws, they easily strongarm politicians and spread copaganda

Cops at the police department I was talking about make around $100K+ with overtime. This is a pretty popular around many departments. Salaries are $60k but cops get a lot of overtime.

It isn't a problem that can be solved with money.

I'd argue that the salaries would be well-deserved if the police were in general better at their jobs, or at least weren't obviously abusive and corrupt in pretty much every jurisdiction.

I don't think 100k is such a magic number anymore that you couldn't find takers for "Make more, without needing the overtime, but get fired more easily if you fuck up". Break things up so you do simple shit that doesn't need to carry a gun for today's pay, have big responsibility but also big rewards if you do the hard shit.

Look how few people in this discussion are saying "oh man that's so much money for that job, I'm gonna quit my job and become a cop." Want top-tier people? Then you have to compete with other top-tier opportunities.

But unfortunately that would really only be easy if you were starting brand new thing from scratch. Much harder with entrenched interests anyway.

You have to have the money but you also have to have the ability to be top-tier. If everything is set up so that you're doomed to fail, you'll only have failures bothering to apply.

In the past this type of thing has usually been solved by creating a new police force under a different name, specific to some aspect that needs work. No idea if it would really help now.

> ...get fired more easily if you fuck up

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Cops already cover for each other's illegalities today when the worst punishment they seem to be getting is paid leave. How much more would they do when a job is on the line?

I've heard this argument before, and I think there's a kernel of truth there. Thing is, municipalities+towns+states have already poured significant public money into police earnings, thanks in part to police unions who negotiate generous overtime rules, defined benefit pensions, and even off-duty pay for private security [1].

I think most people would agree that higher education tends to bring higher salaries, but strangely this is exactly backwards with US policing. It seems to me becoming a police officer is a rare way to get comparatively high and stable earnings _without_ earning a degree or putting in the work and time investment associated with other decently paying jobs.

Meanwhile, Norway requires police officers to earn a three year bachelor's degree and over the past 12 months the # of police killings is low (I think 1). In the US, it's 1,117 - around 3 a day.[2][3]

How would you add a degree or substantial training requirement when the pay is already so high? The status quo in America is a national embarrassment, IMO.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/new-jersey-police-contrac...

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-ki...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

"There needs to be a police reform."

Americorps style residency in low income areas for, let's say, five years.

After such period, with exemplary behavior, one would become eligible for subsidized home ownership in a high income, single family zoned community - with similar covenants on professionalism and decorum.

It's win-win-win:

- Low income areas get young eager beavers who actually live and work in their neighborhoods - and are strongly incentivized to do good.

- Blue-collar workers (the police, very often BIPOC) have a pathway to home ownership and integration into higher income areas.

- Those areas end up with a police force that lives (and polices, and raises their kids) locally in their area.

Who decides "exemplary behavior"? If it's the current institutions, then anything up to and excluding shooting people in their beds at the wrong house will still be "exemplary".

That's the point - it's an end-run around the existing police institutions and unions, etc.

Both destinations - the communities that one polices in during the five year "public service" stint and the eventual destination communities with the subsidized housing - would create their own rules as to what constitutes "exemplary behavior".

There is nothing that the existing policing structures can offer that trumps subsidized home ownership in an affluent/upscale community. The officers will listen to the community and follow their rules.

Note: this is a very rough first expression of an idea I've been kicking around for a while so I will admit it's a little rough around the edges.

> If it's the current institutions, then anything up to and excluding shooting people in their beds at the wrong house will still be "exemplary".

Hell, some institutions make killing an obviously innocent person part of the rite of passage, like the LA Sheriff gangs.

I really like this idea, but you're going to need major top-down cultural changes as well. In the USA, I think it might have to come from Congress and/or SCOTUS, and their heads are very very far up their asses in this regard.

They already do that. The behavior is already stellar according to the people who actually measure it (other cops, what a coincidence)

The house in a HCOL area is paid for with overtime fraud and the only pensions left in America.

26% of arrests in the US are for drug related crimes. 46% of prisoners in federal prison are there for drug related crimes.[1]

We need more than police reform: we need to reform the context that police work in.

There is a huge incentive for police to focus on the most easily accusable crime types. Because drug related offenses are so easy to prosecute, police are heavily motivated to pursue drug related arrests.

The act of pursuing drug related arrests can itself be trivially abused. There is very little distinction between a baseless accusation and a successfully prosecuted crime. This makes it incredibly difficult and subjective to regulate the behavior of officers who are pursuing drug related arrests.

On top of that, we have an overwhelmed court system that can keep the accused waiting weeks, months, or even years to see trial. This pressures the courts to rush justice. From within the court system, a conviction is seen as a success; so it's pretty obvious what outcome is most likely to be falsely generated by that rushed justice.

It's also trivial to abuse those wait times: a dubious accusation is enough to lock away any person the officer chooses. That person may need to wait in jail (generally considered worse than prison) for as much time as the sentence they would be convinced for! Even if an officer faces consequences to that abuse, the consequence can only happen after a length of time that itself is extended by the increasing wait times of the overwhelmed court system.

This creates a feedback loop: the sheer volume of drug convictions creates a conviction in the mind of each officer: pursuing drug related offenses is easy and inherently justified. It's no surprise to me that so many officers approach arrests with oversized egos: incredulous at the idea they could possibly do wrong. This is normal everyday stuff to them, and the entire system expects them to continue.

We all know the war on drugs is a failure of epic proportions. It's time to move on. Every moment we wait is an abuse to the justice system itself and the people to whom it is served.

[1] https://drugabusestatistics.org/drug-related-crime-statistic...

Take away their guns and build community service into their work schedules and they'll reform themselves pretty quickly. At the moment it's an attractive overglamorized profession for young men who played too much cops and robbers as children and who haven't spent enough time in their communities empathizing with people.

> Then, I heard a story from one cop being out with cop buddies and driving wasted, smashing into car and running away.

In BC, a cop was driving from the bar, hit and killed a motorcyclist, left the scene, drove home, downed a couple of shots of vodka to 'steady his nerves'. [1] An old trick that he allegedly shared with his RCMP buddies.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/ex-rcmp-cpl-monty-robinson-get...

He got a 12-month suspended sentence for it. Quite a bit less than what he'd face for killing someone while DUI.

(He later got a 2-year sentence for perjury in an inquiry regarding him killing a Polish immigrant with a taser.)

[1] Which is to say, make it impossible to determine how intoxicated he was at the time that he killed Orion Hutchinson.

> He recently told me all his new recruits cannot write

That is shocking and depressing.

That it is.

Every time some new videos comes out, I'm like yep no surprise. However, there is a significant percentage of Americans who refuse to listen, they just want to defend police, saying there are "bad apples" everywhere. However, there is systemic rot in the police. An honest cop will have a bad time, as they did not obey the bullshit "thin blue line".

People who use the "bad apple" phrase like that are using it to mean the exact opposite of what it actually means and it drives me crazy. The phrase is "one bad apple spoils the bunch."

It's all phrases, like there is some "reclamation" of language to mean the opposite of its original intent. I was recently talking to someone who called himself a "pacifist" so I began the phrase "Si Vis Pacem..." (If you want peace... note that the word pacem is the root of the word pacifist), but even after explaining to him that the ancient phrase ends with "para bellum" (prepare for war) he still defended his draft dodging as "for peace".

Was he using the phrase or just calling himself a pacifist?

He was calling himself a pacifist. But he had no idea what the word "pacifist" actually means - the people who use it today use it without knowing the actual meaning. I did actually ask him to tell me in our language (not English, but he was using the English word) what "pacifist" means and he could not tell me. It's an excuse, not a belief.

But I'm not ranting about pacifists. I'm ranting about how many words are phrases are being redefined. Another one is the word "shame" in my country. Those is favour of judicial reform are using the word as if it has a positive connotation for the past few weeks.

There is nothing in the etymology of the word "pacifism" that restricts it to use in the context or support of war or preparations thereof.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pacifism#etymonline_v_2963

I love Etymology online, I use that site often. You need to read between the lines to understand the context that the site provides. The root of the word "pacifist" is "peace", the word means one who promotes or supports peace and peaceful methods. The ancient phrase that I referenced literally means "if you want peace, prepare for war" - meaning that if this pacifist really believes in peaceful methods, the way to persuade for the other side to use peaceful methods is to be prepared to wage war. There is a good reason that this phrase has stood the test of the centuries.

the way to persuade for the other side to use peaceful methods

But being a pacifist has nothing to do with persuading other people to be peaceful. He's describing himself and his own attitude. I agree with the para bellum saying but it has nothing to do with an individual being a pacifist.

If his own attitude is to prefer the path of peace to the path of war, history has shown over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again that one must demonstrate that he is prepared to fight back. Hence the well known ancient proverb. And I would argue that it is far more true today than it was in an age when the aggressors couldn't readily determine one's preparedness.

The "a few bad apples" line is always darkly funny to me - a complete 180 of the familiar "a few bad apples spoils the barrel."

Most cops are probably not horrible people. However, the current policing system protects the worst, and punishes anyone for speaking out - sometimes violently.

I don't think it's a 180. It's to the effect of 'a few bad apples ... spoils the reputation of the bunch and we should be conscious that not everyone is bad.'

Not that I agree with it, but that's the angle it comes from at least from what I gather.

That's not the historical or empirical meaning of that phrase.

Rot in fruit literally spreads to adjacent fruit. This isn't a lemon market, it's a literal "a few bad apples cause the rest to rot".

I've got anecdotal reports from middle school & junior high teachers that the literacy level of incoming classes been trending strongly downward for about seven or eight years. No sign of stopping so far. Hopefully it's just our city, but I doubt it.

And coincidentally, I listened to the first episode of this podcast today!

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

Wow. Just wow. Really nuts how we got where we are.

Georgia (the country, not the state in US) reformed the police by firing all cops and hiring brand new ones. Not sure how it will work long term, it was relatively recent.

A few localities in the US have tried things like this too. Fire all cops, fold city police department into surrounding county police department, re-hire fired city cops who meet certain criteria.

Back in 2020 amidst the George Floyd murder and subsequent protests, a lot was written about such a program in Camden, NJ: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2020/06/11/police-reform-camden.... However I don't know if things are still going well.

That's just politics and ensuring loyalty to the top of an organization one does not have control of

On a broad level, I don't disagree. But I think it is helpful to keep in mind that the "police" in the US is not monolithic. There are over 18,000 separate police organizations in the US and they are not organized in a strict command hierarchy. Jurisdictions have much more independence in the US than is common in other countries. Canada has just less than 200 police agencies and Sweden has just one (https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-differen...)

Some places need a much more aggressive approach to reform than others. Unfortunately I think the public narrative over the last few years regarding policing in general has very little nuance. As a side effect, the type of people we would like to be involved in policing are being discouraged from considering that career. This is not a healthy trend.

The decentralization of police power in the US is intentional. While better recruitment, training, and implementation is desirable, solutions in this area are going to have to acknowledge that decentralization to be successful, IMHO.

Or just do away with some of that decentralization. Germany also has a federalized system and based on our historical experience, avoiding centralized control over security forces has high priority in our constitutional system. But we still have a quite well-structured system that consists of a couple of federal police forces designed for very specific purposes and state police forces (which are subordinate to state governments only), which are those that interact with citizens on a day-to-day basis. States have their own regulations and laws that govern police work, but they have a loose process of coordinating those among each other and have to work within a federal constitutional framework that sets some explicit boundaries. Having 18,000 police organizations is just asking for bad outcomes, imho, we have plenty of stuff going wrong with 20-30.

If you are concerned about "bad outcomes" in a decentralized system, why do you think consolidating power in a more centralized system would be an improvement?

The idea of minimizing and decentralizing power runs pretty deep in the US.

If the problem is that you want to enforce common minimum standards, improve transparency and training, my guess is that this would be easier to achieve on the more centralized end of the spectrum. If your goal is to maximize the dispersion of power to the local level, go ahead and give every community its own independently run police organization. To a certain extend these goals are in conflict with each other and you have to decide where your priorities are, would be my intuitive sense. For me personally, I feel most comfortable with a system where the police (who are carrying guns and are under certain circumstances entitled to shoot me) is run by institutions that have at least the theoretical capacity to properly finance, run and train those forces and which at the same time have a modicum of accountability to me. In my view that would be state governments, certainly not municipalities.

Start by not hiring anyone with a history in law enforcement.

That will only make it worse, what decent person would go into a job that blacklists you from other jobs?

Not sure why that matters. If you're a town and you don't want terrible law enforcement then you could fire all of the cops, hire new ones that are actually just social workers, lawyers, etc. and go from there. Other towns would be hiring people that you never would but that doesn't affect your local area.

Not defending any of that. In addition it also doesn't help that we've had generations of parents telling kids to be lawyers and doctors and PhDs and avoid any type of civil service work. I feel like a large contributor to the apathy surrounding our government institutions is that nobody wants to be a civil servant. I'm not sure how exactly to fix this, it's just an observation.

I feel like that's generally because parents want their kids to be financially secure, and civil service jobs generally pay pretty poorly. That said, policing is often an exception - there are places where they're underpaid, but often their salaries are solid relative to cost of living.

You could have joined and raised the bar, but shied away from it. The more negative the perception is, the more you guarantee only the worst will join

You can't. They filter out the people who are a threat to them. They even use the union to do this.

I would suggest doing some research on what happens when you try to raise the bar from the inside. There are countless examples of retaliation, to the point of murder, against people who question the status quo. Often times people who do as you suggest end up quitting in disgust anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico

You can't reform a bad institution from within as a low-level worker. Workplace culture comes from the top.

No you cannot. There are a bunch of politics, and silent rules. I don't think you understand how toxic the environment is and how childishly these cops can act.

I suggest reading r/protectandserve for a while. Bonus points if you follow threads after some massive video gets released. You will see a lot of bans of non-verified users and a lot of siding with the cop.

Here is a locked thread from Derek Chauvin sentencing, according to users trial was a sham. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtectAndServe/comments/o7vpe7/der...

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